It’s finally time to talk Doctor Manhattan

Have we all collected our jaws off the floor yet? You didn’t see that one coming, did you?  (OK, some people sure did.)

HBO’s Watchmen capped off its riveting hour of television on Sunday night with an absolutely stunning revelation: Cal Abar (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is, in fact, Doctor Manhattan. He’s been Doctor Manhattan the whole time, though he didn’t know it. Angela sure did, though.

How Sister Night fits into the bigger puzzle is a question for Episode 8 to consider. But the latest chapter finally drops a Doctor Manhattan-sized bomb into the story, and it’s high time we looked closer at who this enigmatic comic book character is and what his arrival means. You know a lot of this already, so think of this as more of a pre-Episode 8 catch-up.

Let’s consider what we already know. The first episode introduced Doctor Manhattan by way of a news report. The footage showed us his blue form from a considerable distance as he built some kind of structure on Mars. A structure that looked suspiciously similar to the countryside estate that Adrian Veidt has called home all season, though in Episode 5 we learned Veidt may actually reside closer to Jupiter.

I told you a few things about the comic book Doctor Manhattan after Episode 1. He’s the only being in the Watchmen-verse (that we know) who possesses actual superpowers. And he used those powers in the distant, pre-comics past to end the Vietnam War all on his own. 

“Time is … an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time.”

A week later, in Episode 2, Adrian Veidt’s play, “The Watchmaker’s Son,” treated us to a version of Doctor Manhattan’s origin story. We learned that a young scientist named Jon Osterman, the titular watchmaker’s son, transformed into a super-being after a freak laboratory accident.

In Veidt’s version, Osterman gets trapped in a test chamber after he goes in to retrieve a watch that was to be a gift to his romantic partner and fellow researcher, Janey Slater. In the play, the two share a melodramatic goodbye through the test chamber door’s glass window before a burst of fire immolates Jon’s physical body. Moments later, he reappears outside the chamber in a new, blue body. Doctor Manhattan is born.

That’s not quite how it went in the comics. The part with the watch and getting trapped in the test chamber is accurate. But Janey peaced out. She didn’t want to watch Jon die. Doctor Manhattan also didn’t emerge right away. His body formed slowly, over a period of months after the accident.

It’s also worth noting: Veidt knows at least some of the true story here. In the comics, he engineered Janey’s long, slow death by cancer. Veidt hates Doctor Manhattan, and he plotted to turn the world against the superbeing by portraying him as a public threat. 

In Episode 3 we met Laurie Blake for the first time, and learned of her connection to Doctor Manhattan. In the pre-comic book past they fought crime together. Laurie was once the Silk Spectre, and she had a romantic relationship with Doctor Manhattan during a period of time when he was still grappling with the dissonance between his former life as a human and his new life as a being that transcends space and time.

Although Laurie eventually moved on in her romantic life, we saw in Episode 3 that she never really got over that relationship. Decades later, she’s still calling her old flame on a phone that the public believes is a direct line to Doctor Manhattan. She also carries around that epic sex toy.

With Doctor Manhattan’s imminent reemergence, the question we’re left with is what else can the comics add to this picture?

Until we know more about where the show is headed, not much. Episode 7 raises a ton of questions about what happened to Doctor Manhattan after the comics ended. Readers were led to believe that he’d fucked off to another planet because human concerns were beneath him. The first episode of this series reinforced that idea with the Mars news report.

But we apparently didn’t have the whole picture. As much as he might have said in the past that he was over humanity, clearly there’s still something tying Doctor Manhattan to his former Earthly concerns. Is it the unfinished business of what Veidt’s actions wrought on the world? Perhaps some desire to right Earth’s path to destruction that was set in motion by Doctor Manhattan’s very existence?

The problem with predicting Doctor Manhattan’s behavior – and this is important to understand as he enters the HBO story – is he doesn’t think like us. We got a taste of that earlier in the season when Cal talks about death with his and Angela’s kids, explaining matter-of-factly that people just cease to exist when they die. Many have picked up on that as a distinctly Manhattan-esque perspective. (And used it to fuel “Cal is Manhattan!” theories.)

So maybe he’s taking part in all of this because some piece of him feels like his presence upset the natural course of existence. Maybe he’s doing it because Jon Osterman the human is still somewhere in there, deep down, and he’s had it with being used as a tool by Earthly interests. Or maybe, just maybe, Doctor Manhattan is simply doing what Doctor Manhattan was always meant to do.

He’s suggested as much before, in the comics. As an earlier version of Doctor Manhattan once said:

“There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.”